Sunday, April 7, 2019

Wasabi

Saturday evening, I officiated Ramsey and Lorens’s wedding ceremony, at Sanders Hitch, in Fort Worth, Texas. Here are the remarks I shared with them and their guests:

I ask every person I marry, not only why they want to get married, but why now. Lorens’s answer is, um, interesting: “To me Ramsey is like Wasabi.” This may be the first groom of more than 400 to analogize his bride to a condiment. Stick with him, though. He explains that what he means is that she has a spicy nature, which keeps him on his toes, and “makes things interesting and joyful... Her kindness and genuine heart, and joi de vivre would win any man over.” And then like every good Jew he answers a question with a question, “Why wouldn’t I want to marry her now?”

When I asked Ramsey to write about herself, she did so in a way that very few people do. She wrote in the third person. To me this is very telling. I believe that it says that the person is able to step outside of herself, see the world from others’ points of view, and understand that there is something greater than what meets the eye. That type of thinking is crucial to a successful marriage, because central to marriage is the understanding that it’s not all about you.


Lorens embraced this wise idea early on, and it strengthened inside him, as he matured: “Since I was a kid, I always questioned why things are the way they are... I always enjoyed talking with men of science or of faith – especially Rabbis, trying to figure out why something was the way it was. I always felt the presence of God, but when I went to engineering school, I... had a new-found appreciation of existence.”

It is this shared deep consciousness that moves Ramsey to say, I didn’t seriously date for years because I was sure it was impossible for me to find someone a quarter of the man my dad is. I was lucky enough to find this in Lorens.”

This is why Lorens says, “I always tried to figure out who the right one was... life guided me to the answer I couldn’t have dreamt of.”

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